If there were, there would have to be a rule for those rules, and so on.”Īll rules, Carse shows, are self-imposed, even if they seem absolutely universal. “There are no rules that require us to obey rules. “Rules are not valid because the Senate passed them, or because heroes once played by them, or because God pronounced them through Moses or Muhammad.” “There is no finite game unless the players freely choose to play it. “A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”Ĭarse insists that there is a persistent illusion in our society that boundaries and rules exist outside of ourselves, but they do not. One could be called finite, the other infinite.”
(Read it with a friend! It’s slow going and having someone to talk to about it helps.)įinite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility Perhaps the best way to describe it is an entire liberal arts education in a single book, a playful yet intellectual tour de force. There’s a lot of counterintuitive ideas in this book and Hofstader talks through with fun thought experiments and his childlike sense of wonder at how amazing the world is bleeds through. This makes about as much intuitive sense as saying you can eat your own head, but, it’s, well, math. (Or is it about thinking about thinking about thinking?)Īt the core, the book is about Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem which says any formal system that is interesting enough to formulate its own consistency can prove its own consistency if and only if it is inconsistent. Or, even better, it’s about thinking about thinking. Maybe a better way to describe GEB is that it is about thinking. Math, formal logic, music, art, consciousness, emergence, complexity, evolution, artificial intelligence, computer science, and language are all explored (in detail). Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid According to Hume’s observation, we are both selfish and humane. Humes main virtue seems to be his ability to deal with ambiguity and greyness without falling back into a black or white understanding of the world. Just like dogs or cows, we evolved in such a way that we can’t help but project past patterns into the future. We do assume after touching a few stoves that touching the next will hurt us, but Hume points out this has nothing to do with logic. Hume’s answer is that there is no logical reasoning. What logical reasoning do we then have to assume that touching another stove will result in getting burned again? You may observe that every time you touch a stove, you get burned.
He asks what grounds we have for believing that multiple repetitions of an experiment lead us to believe it is a certainty. The pushback against man as a fully rational animal - that has come into the mainstream dialogues as a result of recent behavioral psychology research - was Hume’s main point. In many ways, Hume’s observations seem incredibly modern. Over the past few years, Hume seemed to keep popping up on my radar so I decided it was finally sit down to read him. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
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